This invention relates to safety apparatuses aiding in the extraction of persons from dangerous positions and, more particularly, to safety harnesses or belts which can be quickly and easily donned by potential rescuers or those needing rescue and facilitate dragging of the wearer, or safely lifting or lowering the wearer vertically in a rescue operation.
Rescue workers such as fireman, police officers, paramedics and military personnel and the like often encounter other persons needing extraction from perilous situations. Extraction of the person may require horizontal dragging, dragging up stairs and other inclines, or vertically lifting and lowering. Persons requiring rescue may include persons other than the rescue workers themselves.
Removing a person from a hazardous situation must be accomplished in a manner that best conserves the rescuers time and energy. The person requiring extraction may be incapacitated requiring the rescuer to drag, rather than carry, the person to safety. This can be very tiring to the rescuer, especially when the person is larger than the rescuer. The use of drag harnesses, such as taught by U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,205,584 and 4,854,418, provide the rescuer with an easily grasped strap securely attached to the person's body; however, such harnesses do not allow for self-equalizing the harness when grasped by more than one rescuer. The lack of a self-equalizing feature results in disparate amounts of effort being required of the respective rescuers and makes the harness less comfortable to the person being rescued. It also increases the likelihood that the person being rescued may slip out of the harness. Accordingly, there is a need for a self-equalizing harness that a rescuer can quickly and easily put on a person needing rescue and which allows one or more rescuers to drag the person to safety.
Other harnesses, such as those taught by U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,086,091; 2,108,066; and 1,357,772 provide a device for elevating a person, but incorporate an arrangement of clips and adjustment buckles that complicate donning in an emergency situation and provide limited ability to accommodate equipment, such as air tanks, which are commonly worn by rescue personnel. In addition, the harnesses are not easily incorporated into a fireman's jacket and the bulkiness of such harnesses does not lend to compact storage for carrying by fireman or other rescue personnel. Accordingly, there is also a need for a harness that can be incorporated into a fireman's jacket for quick and easy donning and with a built in rescue harness by which either one or two rescue personnel in a walking position can drag an unconscious fireman to safety.